SmartRules bug relating to tags and resources

A few months ago I posted about what appears to be a bug with Conditional Formatting in MM 2018 when tags are used as a trigger. Unfortunately this problem does not appear to have resolved in MM 2019 (including the latest service pack) despite the revamping of Conditional Formatting as SmartRules, and I've discovered that it also affects Resources.

To reiterate, if a rule is set so that a tag or resource is the trigger and "Is Exactly" the condition, then in my view the rule should apply only to topics which have only that tag or resource present. However, it appears the rule can still be triggered if there are multiple tags, provided the target tag is present among them. The same thing happens if a resource is used for the trigger instead of a tag.

In other words, "Is Exactly" and "Contains" appear to work the same way as triggers when applied to tags and resources, which is illogical and is also a serious limitation on the usefulness of SmartRules. What should happen in relation to tags for example is that "Contains" should trigger the application of the rule if the target tag is present among multiple tags, but "Is Exactly" should be applied only if the target tag is the only one present. The same should apply to similar rules used with resources.

Alex Gooding, Champion

1037 Posts
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Posted 5 months ago

4 months ago

Alex Gooding, Champion

1037 Posts
251 Reply Likes

Update: I have received an interesting response from Mindjet Customer Support regarding this issue. It states in part:

"Is exactly" and "Contains" don't work the same, Exactly is the exact same tag name, while "Contains" could be a 2 word tag with one word matching.

Now we don't have the option to say whether there's only 1 tag or one resource exclusively, it could be an option to add that to the trigger parameters, but at the moment we don't have it; it will have to be and exact match and exclusive of other tags. So for now this is working properly.

In response I requested that Mindjet/Corel review this, and went on to sate:

...the current situation means there is no way to select topics which have only the nominated tag, and no other. The same applies to Resources, and I note that with Icons "Contains" is the only option.

My suggestion would be to leave "Contains" as is, so that topics are shown if they contain a tag with either a complete match between the trigger text and a tag name, or where the tag name contains the trigger text, even if there are other tags on any of these topics.

However, "Is exactly" should only select those topics with a single tag only where that tag is an exact match to the trigger text. This should also apply to resources, and an "Is exactly" option should be added to selection by icon within SmartRules.

I'd be interested to know what other people think.